


you are my holy shroud.

by aalgorithm



Category: Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020), Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Post-remake Advent Children Story, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:54:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25196509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aalgorithm/pseuds/aalgorithm
Summary: chase your dreams away / glass needles in the haythe sun forgives the clouds / you are my holy shroud
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 9
Kudos: 53





	you are my holy shroud.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my short interpretation of the remake's implication that Zack may be alive and may interact with Cloud's new timeline, having beaten past fate and the story of the original game, in the world of FFVII: Advent Children.

you are my holy shroud.

(zack/cloud)

_zack_

Zack remembered very little from the journey towards Midgar, away from the hail of bullets, away from the lies, away from the remnants of life that wasn’t his nor what he thought it was. It was all strained green and slimy. It smelled of sterile gloves and scalpels that shine under harsh, clinical lights. It felt hot and damp and red. Sometimes, it felt painful.

Recounting the journey out of Hojo’s clutches was never comfortable. Zack would stay up late at night, face turned towards the moonlight that shines through thinning curtains and try to piece it back together. And he could only get so far before it became a mess of intersecting maybes and what-ifs, impenetrable no matter how he looked at it, agonizing no matter how he tried to fool himself into believing it was nothing but falsehoods.

That night, Zack remembered, as he sat up in bed, ignoring how the ancient mattress moans, the weight of his own arms. For years he’d trained, for years he’d watched as Angeal hoisted his blade like a plume of feathers, for years he’d longed to do the same, and for years he’d succeeded. But, as the last of the SHINRA infantrymen collapsed into the dusty landscape just outside the city, his arms had ached. They’d throbbed, pulsed, begged for a moment’s respite, and they raged when Zack denied them.

Zack remembered his trek back to Cloud and the way his nerves ignited fires of fear, only for simple logic to scramble and put them out. He remembered the relief that swelled in his chest, like light threatening to burst from between his ribs, at the sight of his partner in the same position in which he’d been left: unconscious, silent, poisoned, untouched, untouchable.

And Zack remembered how he’d willed his arms and legs and back into lifting Cloud onto his limp feet, threading his shoulders beneath Cloud’s own and dragging. Now, standing and creaking a dingy hardwood floor beneath his bare feet, Zack felt the same strain in his thighs, the same dryness in his throat, the same pining for rest.

Zack moved slowly across the room, rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes, and stopped in front of the bathroom mirror, unseeing. He doesn’t bother unblurring his vision in hopes that an ignorance in the present will translate into ignorance in the retrospective.

He didn’t want to remember what follows, but he’d woken up every night like clockwork to recount it and had yet to discover how to stop the cycle.

Zack remembered the assurances he’d murmured as he’d lugged Cloud across the downtrodden, desert battlefield because he said them to himself, too. He remembered every word because he spoke for them both. He remembered wanting nothing more than company, nothing more than the revelation that he hasn’t been alone the whole time. He wanted Cloud to come home; Zack remembered thinking this as they descended the hill in a rainstorm, the drops stinging the deep, bleeding wounds that lined his arms.

Zack wanted Cloud to come home to _him_. And now, he thought, waiting for his eyes to refocus in the rusted mirror, that perhaps he should’ve been more precise. When asking favors of the universe, he was to learn, the ‘powers that be’ demanded specificity. It would’ve been nice for the cosmos to pity him, to understand that the string of fractured, desperate thoughts that ran through his mind weren’t the most coherent but knew _now_ that such thinking was selfish. Entitled. Undeserving, apparently.

Zack remembered how, at the base of the hill, as Midgar stood in its steel-plated glory a few hundred feet, yards, miles, years away, it had erupted before his eyes. He remembered the heat that bloomed in his chest and the scent of lilies that followed. He remembered turning towards the invisible source, drunk on a memory, drunk on the delicate voice of someone he used to know, before noting the departure of weight atop his shoulders, the sudden sensation of being free, of being naked.

Cloud was gone, Zack’s Buster blade gone with him. Like the rain, he came and went only to leave a chilled, delirious Zack clawing at the dirt floor in his wake.

Zack hated remembering this portion of the story, but he did so every night and imagined he’d continue to do so for the next two years to come, should nothing change. It painted his face pale, the underneath of his eyes black and blue. It gave a slouch to his step, an ache in the small of his back and in his left temple which flared up on nights when he couldn’t help but ruminate on the absurdity of his new life.

His fingers griiped the sink basin, now filled with icy waters, and he submerged his head. His hair swam in the shallow depths. It tickled his eyelids and cheeks, danced around his scar, that which kept him grounded and reminded him that he still occupied a body even when Cloud seemed to have lost that ability.

Zack stayed inundated until the water traveled up his nose. He coughed violently, spattering the moisture down his chest.

The two years following Cloud’s departure felt full and active in the moment, but Zack had little to show for them anymore. He’d discarded the notion of rekindling things in Midgar some hours after Cloud’s disappearance, fumbling around blindly in the desert, babbling incoherencies he couldn’t replicate if he tried. Freshly alone.

And He knew it was unforgivable the moment his boots spun, kicking up dust as they went. He knew who he was leaving behind, the hope he was extinguishing like a match on its last legs, threatening to burn whomever had lit it. To justify this, Zack made the oath to the Cloud he couldn’t see and the Aerith he could no longer feel that he was couldn’t return until he’d unraveled what had taken Cloud and where he was to be found.

Zack remembered now that, after about six months of riding this obsession, it, too, was extinguished. Like sand in his fingers, Cloud slipped away.

Sometimes he would look to the sky and the puffs of white that populated it. He tried to wait until nightfall before observing. It would remind him of the times they spent riding on Cissnei’s motorcycle, Cloud’s chin nestled against Zack’s chest, breathing steadily and safe. Zack would point out the constellations that were visible between the clouds as they were painted purple by the oncoming darkness.

In those days that spent traveling from Gongaga, Nibelheim, and all the grief to be had in between, Zack tried to pinpoint which tuft of moisture resembled his lost companion the most. He would stare until he saw Cloud’s countenance; not that which was rendered motionless by mako but the animated, soft-spoken yet impassioned face he’d grown to know beforehand. And once such an expression appeared, Zack picked up the conversation like they’d never been separated, like he’d never fallen into an endless sleep, like SHINRA had never touched them.

Zack in the present understood that this was cowardice, his two-year campaign across western Gaia but a distraction from that which he couldn’t handle. Yet, when the realization came, as Zack stooped beneath charred remnants of Nibelheim, a house that he understood to once have belonged to the Strife family, it was no easier to act upon. Midgar still stood as a testament to his failures, his fears, and his misery, which, as of late, had begun to feel bottomless.

In the end, it’s a dream that finally motivated Zack into action. It reminded him profoundly of the warmth, the flowers, and the voice he’d heard as Midgar had come crashing down twenty-four months prior. It reminded him of more loss. It conveyed that _she_ was no longer there.

Zack drained the water from the sink. By then, he’d been living in the ruins of Sector Five for three days, a welcome immigrant amidst a sea of suffering following a calamity no one yet had the words to depict to him. He didn’t pry, of course. He had enough to think about and enough to process on his own.

He hadn’t visited her church yet. No matter how staunch and tempting the scent of her flowers grew, he didn’t visit. Somehow, he knew the way, as though the route were as familiar as the veins that traveled down his arms, but he didn’t follow it. Instead Zack helped around the neighborhood, delivering water filters to newcomers without housing and small-talking them into smiles. He didn’t ask anyone for pay; instead he gazed up at the sky and wonders if his once-upon-a-time mercenary partner scolds him from above.

That night, as Zack turned back into his bed and slid underneath the cotton sheets, he couldn’t define the version of Cloud’s fate he’d constructed in his mind. He didn’t think anyone could if they tried. He knew Cloud wasn’t dead but wouldn’t allow himself the luxury of pining for his return.

It was twisted, really. So, when the bullet hole scars started dotting his chest the following morning, remnants of a battle he certainly did not remember fighting, he wasn’t shocked. He was intrigued and ran his fingers down the carnage, bemused. Not shocked.

He saved the shock for the rapping on his door and the face that greeted him when he flung it open, still shuffling his shirt on over his shoulders, unshowered, squinting the sunrise away.

“ _Zack_?”

_tifa_

With Cloud gone and Marlene being more help than any of the adults around, Tifa found herself with more than a few seconds to herself these days. She usually took such instances of time outside on the porch where she could smell the heat of the day and wave candidly to the folks strolling about. She liked getting to catch their glimpses of solace; it set the mood for the day and put a kick in her step as she doted about the Seventh Heaven bar.

But on one morning in particular, Tifa sat tightly along the stairs leading up to Seventh Heaven, a drizzle barely touching the tips of her boots, unaware of her beloved surroundings. She gripped her cellphone firm in her hands, unable to stop ogling the blank screen, her empty inbox, the still unread messages she’d been sending for days on end.

“ _You can’t hide forever. I know you want to. Sometimes I do, too. But that’s not fair to you or the rest of us.”_

_“Please come home.”_

_“Marlene and Denzel keep asking for you. What am I supposed to tell them?”_

_“Is that what she would want for you?”_

Tifa read them back and swallowed the resurgence of venom; the last message was uncalled for, harped on a wound she knew had yet to properly heal. But, apparently, even her atypical rage wasn’t worthy of a reply.

“Even something _mean_ would be better than nothing,” she whispered into her palms as she held her chin in her hands, watching puddles accumulate across Edge’s streets. She meant it, too.

Marlene would be awake soon, and she’d ask where Cloud had run off too, again, and Tifa would barely manage to pacify her with her malnourished, ill-rehearsed answers, and the responsibility for drying her tears would fall unfairly to Denzel. Tifa could see it unfold behind her eyes. It’s the reality she’d lived for nearly ten days now.

“Excuse me, miss Tifa?”

Tifa blinked away raindrops that had begun to splash onto her forehead.

“Miss Tifa?”

A familiar face stood before her, big-eyed and curious; the paper boy. His overalls were soaked through and he’d draped his raincoat overtop the rudimentary neighborhood news pamphlet Edge had put together. His name was Emmet.

“Oh! Emmet. Sorry, I must’ve zoned out.”

She extended her hand to receive a pamphlet, but Emmet hesitates.

“Is everything alright?”

“I…I have news. About that guy.”

Feeling ears and eyes on them where there weren’t any, Tifa immediately scanned the block of shops and apartments before pulling Emmet underneath the porch awning. He dropped a cluster of pamphlets as he stumbled along, barely clearing the stairs.

“You do?” Tifa inquired. “What did you learn?”

“Well, he just got there a few days ago. That’s what Fallon told me. He’s staying alone.”

“Did Fallon say where he’d come from?”

Emmet had miraculous connections to all outskirts of the old Midgar, all of whom were children of around the same age. It came with the job, Tifa assumed, and had a guilty pleasure of exploiting it.

“No. He doesn’t talk to people too much. That’s what Fallon said the landlord Juniper told her.”

“No name then?”

Emmet shook his head, acknowledging whatever look of defeat dawned across Tifa’s expression.

“No. Not yet.”

“Well did she at least get a good look at him?”

“Sure.” Emmet nodded. “She said that he was…tall. Had big muscles. Lots of black hair.”

“Eyes like Cloud?”

Emmet looked shocked, a smile of incredulity pulling at his lips.

“How did you know I was gonna say that?” he demanded, insisting that Tifa was a mind-reader instead of an informed and urgent detective. With the blow of confirmation she’d just been dealt, the latter sure seemed a lot more plausible.

“Lucky guess, that’s all,” she assured him. “Thank you, Emmet. You’ve been a big, big help.”

He gave her a salute, pink in the cheeks and taking the praise in stride.

“No problem, miss Tifa! Now I really gotta get going. My pamphlets are getting soaked!”

“Wait, take this…”

In a dash Tifa leapt inside Seventh Heaven, ruffled around in the broom closet, and removed a black umbrella. And while it was about double Emmet’s spindly frame, she hoped it was better than nothing.

“You oughta wear your raincoat, or you’ll catch a cold out here,” she stated, handing it to him.

“But…this is yours –”

“It’s a gift to pay you back. Don’t mention it.”

Emmet opened the umbrella in one great whoosh, laughing aloud at the size and at Tifa’s minute gesture of kindness. He took off in the direction from which he’d come, waving back to her as he skipped.

“Bye, miss Tifa! And thank you!”

She smiled and waved back. On any normal day it was a pleasure to see Emmet as he was one of the few children devoid of any patches of flayed, darkening skin, one of the few who still could manage a childlike run, could still summon the youthful glee of which an old umbrella would otherwise be undeserving.

But his appearance was of great consequence on that rainy, grey morning. As Tifa turned back inside and trudged up the stairs toward Marlene’s room, the monochrome sky grew neon green and blue, electric and vibrant amidst of sea of drab, colorless skies and landscapes and futures.

“Where are we going, Tifa?” Marlene yawned as Tifa shucked Marlene’s pink raincoat onto her tiny, narrow shoulders. “It’s…it’s _early_ …”

“To find Cloud,” she replied, ignoring the partial lie and the way it blossomed hope onto Marlene’s cherub face.

“Oh boy! Oh boy!” she exclaimed, darting ahead of Tifa and jittering in place at Seventh Heaven’s doorway. “I’m gonna give him a _lecture_ when we find him!”

Tifa ruffled her hair and placed Marlene’s hand in hers.

“That’s right. I’ve taught you well, huh?”

It wasn’t a hapless idea, to picture Cloud taking refuge in the sole place where remnants of _her_ remained. It made partial sense, enough to go on, enough to lie to Marlene, enough to justify the journey to Barret, Cid, Yuffie, and whomever else decided to prod at her reasoning.

Her hunch was too big. It wouldn’t leave her alone. Ever since she’d heard of the stranger immigrant who’d wandered into Sector Five from lands unknown and dedicated himself to installing the same water filters Jesse had decided in ages’ past, the hunch pestered and pestered her.

She would do anything to break through to Cloud, search under any rock to offer him, at the very least, closure. It’s what she knew he needed. It’s what so few folks were afforded those days. It’s what he deserved.

But was there closure to be had in the dead resurfacing?

_cloud_

Cloud checked the petals for footprints, for wilts, for dead ends, for burns, for slices, for bruises, scrapes, and stitches. He cut off the fraying ends the moment he returned from a long day’s work, placing himself cross-legged in the center of their greenery and working with the scissors he kept underneath his pillow.

This was his routine. It had been for ten days, at least, ever since he’d migrated to the church in the wake of a new rush of grief he hadn’t the know-how to parse through. He found that cutting dead pieces off of yellow and white lilies that bloomed in the only sunshine ruined Midgar had to offer at least kept his hands busy. And he needed that, needed moments in time wherein the outside world didn’t exist, moments where he felt useful again.

Cloud put all the dead petals and stems into a cloth sack. It smelled fragrant and faraway. The idea of discarding them felt wrong, and he wouldn’t be surprised if a bolt of lightning hailed down unto him from the ceiling should he try, sent by hers truly.

These days there was an anchor in Cloud’s stomach that wouldn’t let up. He couldn’t find the chain to which it was attached, let alone summon the strength to pull it from the acidic depths and through the length of his throat. It swayed and rocked against his insides when he stood up to retrieve the watering can he’d swiped from Tifa, back at the start of her garden, before they realized Gaia wasn’t that forgiving that soon and her tomatoes and herbs wilted away. He kept it underneath the second, older hole in the ceiling where it could collect rainwater, which he then doused the flowers in.

There was a mark on the hardwood floor now, a discoloration that matched the exact shape of the can’s bottom, an imprint demarcating where it belonged.

Cloud knew the flowers got plenty of water throughout the day on their own; they grew, after all, in the light of the dilapidated church’s structure. The holes left by Cloud and his predecessor had already rendered the building compromised; the meteor had nearly demolished it. Yet this only made Cloud treat the flowers with even more delicacy and care, despite them displaying a profound hardiness that he oftentimes admired.

It was a distraction, too. It was a way of wasting time until it was dark enough to sleep and avoid returning home where Tifa said he was needed. He’d read her messages, been injured at the subtle mentioning of Aerith, and resolved to sleep on it. If he really was needed, she’d stop by and find, but she didn’t, because Tifa was capable and strong and could see a future that still twinkled in starlight.

He wasn’t needed, and he shouldn’t be. Of this, Cloud was sure. There was death on his shoulders, on his mind, cemented to his body, ground into the very fibers of his skin. It stuck to the indents in his hands. They looked red and weary, afraid to touch, afraid to ruin.

So Cloud tended to the flowers. They were of a rare breed resilient enough to brave his destruction. He couldn’t hurt them. Aerith must be watching over her field, her life’s work; only she had that kind of strength. Cloud knew this, too, and hoped he did her proud.

He was failing, of course. He knew that.

_zack_

Marlene was sticking her hand almost inside Zack’s tear duct as she observed his luminescent shade. Her eyes were so dark, so nebulous, that he could see the reflection of his irises in her pupils.

“Just like Cloud’s,” she observed, pressing her nose to Zack’s.

“Marlene, _please_ , be careful –”

“It’s fine,” Zack laughed, gripping Marlene by her underarms and lifting her high above his head, relishing in her giggles. “You’re as light as a feather, miss Marlene! What is miss Tifa feeding you?”

“Fruits and veggies!” Marlene insisted, shining in the onset of dusk.

“How _boring_ ,” Zack remarked, lowering his new friend back to the dirt road just for her to start pulling at his slacks.

“I’m the worst, huh,” Tifa mused, face attempting to work itself into a smile. Zack saw that it was a failure and wondered if he was producing similar results.

He didn’t want to smile. He wanted to buckle at the knees, assumed he was to wake up under Hojo’s microscope again at any moment.

“I know it doesn’t make sense…” Tifa started, running flyaway strands of her hair behind her ears. “Nothing’s made sense. Not for a while. And, ever since we got Cloud’s memories back, everything just got so much more _complicated_.”

“I haven’t gotten crazy enough to think of an explanation myself. I’ll take that one.”

Tifa seemed relieved that Zack had no questions, and he was relieved that she didn’t demand that he ask them. The thought of a resurgence of Sephiroth, Cloud’s defeat of Fate itself, and Zack existing in an intersection point between his own reality and one that had strung him up with a much bleaker fate was too much to comprehend at once. So he accepted it a face-value and charged ahead.

If the new reality had an afterlife, he knew Angeal was frowning down upon him.

“But he’s here?”

Tifa extended her hand out to Marlene, who reluctantly departed Zack’s side and returned to her initial post.

“He’s here. Somewhere.”

A thrumming started up somewhere in Zack’s chest. It was familiar, somehow. He touched the fabric of his shirt and rubbed until he reached the new scars.

“And I’m _not_ here.”

Tifa shook her head, reluctant to press on.

“No. That’s why Cloud…filled you in.”

He heard the explanation somewhere beyond himself, to his right, in the atmosphere, Tifa’s voice mingling just beneath the stars. They were seeking to trick him.

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry. I…I wish I could tell you more, but –”

“Don’t. It’s fine. I… _we_ have a lot to sort out. It’s not your job,” he assured her, his pretend brave face burning holes in his cheeks. “Do you think you know where he is?”

Tifa turned to her rear, staring down a path that Zack immediately, although inexplicably, recognized. Her hair flowed slowly in a warm breeze; she, too, was longing for something.

“I have a hunch.”

“Well, whenever you’re ready.”

Another lie. Zack admired Tifa and the wisdom she possessed; with but a glance she could read straight through him, through his mako-infested irises and into the panic stirring in his head at the prospect of their upcoming journey.

“You sure?”

Marlene pulled at Tifa’s hand, eager to find Cloud, and Zack wondered what he meant to the child. He’d never pictured Cloud as a family man, never got around to seeing _himself_ as one, either.

“As sure as I’ve ever been.”

There was no room for hesitation after two years. He’d done enough of it by avoiding Midgar, avoiding SHINRA, avoiding Aerith, avoiding the missing chunks of his heart that had grown decayed in his absence. He hadn’t visited Angeal’s makeshift grave in ages and he had yet to bring himself to Aerith’s church. It embarrassed him.

“Okay then.”

Tifa took but one step before coming to another realization, a shade of ghostly white passing over her entire figure. Even Marlene stopped tugging her along, disturbed by the expression. Zack stopped beside her.

“Tifa?”

“You know where we’re going, right?”  
“The church. Don’t know _how_ I knew, I just –”

“You feel her?”

Tifa watched the ground as she spoke, a mistiness befalling the red hue of her eyes. Zack hated the sadness, wished it away, wanted to pry it out of her.

“Y-yeah. Aerith. She’s like that.”

“Ethereal.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Zack chuckled, sensing a chip in his old armor. “More poetic than I could’ve put it, of course…”

Tifa interrupted. She placed a delicate hand on Zack’s shoulder, a transient, ephemeral touch conveying more than expected. More than Zack thought possible. Glancing to Marlene, he noted the teardrop pouring slowly down her round face, which she quickly made to wipe away.

Zack remembered his dream, the way Aerith had called to him, spurred him to life, to action, out of his misery. He remembered her light.

“She’s…”

Zack remembered the way Aerith had watched him regain consciousness, how she’d joked and ogled and giggled until he found his footing. More than anything, he remembered the sunlight that had framed her, her eyes brighter than mako. She fueled the sun. She grew the flowers. He’d been convinced of this.

“She’s gone.”

_tifa_

It would’ve been less painful had they made the journey in silence. She would’ve understood, empathized with the darkness passing across her new partner’s expression, helped dried his tears, even given him a shoulder on which to lean until they reached their destination. But Tifa was trailing behind Zack and Marlene, struggling through her own resurgence of sadness, and noting a similarity between Zack Fair and the object of his search, Cloud Strife.

He wouldn’t be broken, not before an audience.

Zack’s mechanisms for pulling this off seemed much more positive than Cloud’s, of course, who had made the executive decision to annex himself from their halfway-family and take refuge elsewhere. Zack chose to amplify his thinning joy, to smile bigger, to laugh louder, to treat Marlene even kinder than he had in the first five minutes of knowing her. He pointed out the sights to her as they walked, mingled with passing stray cats that brushed tenderly against his legs, and hoisted Marlene up unto his shoulders. But Tifa noticed how tightly he clung to her ankles not for her stability, but for his own.

Tifa had undergone loss, and a lot of it, too. She still awoke at night longing for those who’d been lost in their struggle against Sephiroth, and more often than not Aerith’s face was the last she saw before closing her eyelids. Sometimes she wondered if Aerith sent them as messages, her little, miniscule dreams, and other times Tifa convinced herself she was being ridiculous.

But she knew the rage her heart had endured. She knew how she’d cried, how she’d screamed, how she’d beat her hurt into Cloud with soft fists that crumpled upon impact. She knew the feeling of fighting to no avail, of wishing and praying and just never being heard.

So when Tifa looked to Zack Fair, she could detect that very same war of agony taking place behind the scenes. And yet, at the same time, she knew he was reaching new heights she hoped she’d never have to see.

How was he to reconcile with Cloud when Cloud himself had absorbed the entirety of Zack’s existence into his own subconscious, only to process it falsely. Cloud had been so twisted at the revelation of Zack that, even as the loss of Aerith had loomed heavy on his shoulders – and loom it did; he couldn’t stand to be home anymore, the guilt had been damming up for so long – Tifa could sense that it was the unknown someone from SOLDIER that had him so deeply injured.

How was Zack taking it all? How was he laughing, spinning a child on his muscular shoulders, basking in moonlight? It made Tifa ache. It made her stomach turn. The final bend before Aerith’s church couldn’t have come any sooner.

Zack knelt to the ground and shuffled Marlene from her perch, shoes clopping clumsily on the remnants of the old brick roads. They were scattered and lopsided now; the rebuilding effort had yet to touch the older portions of Sector Five. Somehow, Tifa deduced, this ended up being a blessing to all who knew Aerith; the thought of strangers touching the church was a blow they might not be able to take.

“It looks the same,” Zack murmured, gazing at the building, youth in his eyes. “I mean, it looks a lot _worse_. A lot more…”

“Destroyed,” Tifa suggested.

“Yeah. That. But…still the same.”

Marlene went right back to grasping Tifa’s wrist and pulling, pulling, pulling towards their destination, yet this time she had news to share.

“Tifa! Tifa! I see Cloud’s bike!”

Sure enough, the motorcycle was parked on the dimly lit side of Aerith’s church, propped up against the outside wall, easy to steal. Tifa shook her head at his typical carelessness before looking to the third member of their party.

“He’s got a motorcycle…”

It was more of an observation than a question, one that Tifa understood had significance to Zack. She recalled fondly the day Cloud purchased the bike and the barely-there spark that lit up his step in the days that followed. Yet it was that very vehicle that gave him the means to run away.

She didn’t know how to feel.

“He’s here! He’s in the church!”

Marlene dashed ahead, prompting Tifa and Zack to jog after her. And even as they’d relinquished the runaway child, who was about to clamber her way up the collapsed cathedral steps, Tifa hesitated.

“You know…he may be on a walk,” she told Marlene. “He might have needed to stretch his legs. His last delivery was far away, you know.”

“But it’s nighttime,” Marlene protested, trying to see through Tifa’s deception without the conversational know-how.

“You know how Cloud is. He _always_ stays up late.”

“And he always _whines_ about how _tired_ he is.”

“He does. And that’s why we lecture him.”  
Behind Marlene, Zack climbed the first row of stairs, looking between the slightly ajar front doors of the church.

“He was always a complainer…” he pondered, amusement attempting to permeate his disbelief.

“Sounds like he’s pretty similar to the Cloud you knew,” Tifa offered up, hoping to draw up some solace only to create more nerves.

“You can only hope so,” he countered.

Marlene didn’t get the implication and tried squeezing in and around Zack to make it inside. She moaned when Tifa held her back, looking between Zack’s confusion and Tifa’s determination to give him the time he deserved.

“Come on, Marlene. We ought to check out the neighborhood. Just to make sure he didn’t get lost or anything.”

“Aw, but I _like_ Aerith’s church…”

“I know you do. We can visit again soon.”

Zack shook his head, panic-stricken.

“Oh, no, you don’t have to –”

He looked like Cloud in his lowest moments. Weeks ago, Tifa found him cowered before the window to his bedroom, strewn in moonlight, tears streaked down his face. Broken. Armor chipped to bits and pieces at his feet.

Zack, amidst his strength that Tifa had yet to even understand, looked weak at the foot of Aerith’s church. Cloud had never made Tifa privy to Zack’s story. She remembered him solely from their momentary meeting so many years prior and the way Aerith had occasionally described him, dreamlike and wistful. It used to make Tifa jealous; now she just couldn’t believe how accurate Aerith’s descriptions had been.

He needed this conclusion. He needed familiarity. He needed someone who knew him as he did them. Tifa doubted there was anyone left in the world who could manage that for Zack Fair; he had, presumably, jumped universes just to reach Cloud.

“You need to talk to him,” she stated, separating herself and Marlene from his side. “You’ve waited long enough.”

He didn’t know how to protest. His brow became furrowed and his chest twitched beneath his threadbare shirt, but he didn’t refute.

“I’m sorry,” he decided upon. “About Aerith. I knew her.”

“I know. She talked about you. Only good things.”

Zack gripped the cathedral doors for support, floored by this revelation. Tifa felt tantalized by her lack of knowledge, the sudden realization that so much of her best friends’ lives had remained secret to her.

“Don’t keep yourself waiting anymore,” she insisted. “We’ll be back around in a little while.”

He nodded and slid inside, gone in an instant. As quickly as he’d appeared, in Tifa’s life, in Sector Five, in a timeline entirely separate from his own, he was gone. She blinked a few times just to make sure she really was standing at the foot of the church, hand in hand with Marlene, and not enduring some fever dream created by her own, grieving subconscious.

“Tifa, how does that guy know Cloud?”

She didn’t have the right answer. Not the full one, at least.

“They were friends a long time ago, and they got separated. But now they’re together again.”

Marlene enjoyed this answer.

“That’s good. I hope Cloud is happy to see him.”

It was a lofty hope, the kind that Tifa had come to begrudgingly realize was rarely granted.

“Me too.”

_cloud_

Cloud was thumbing the bag of dead flower petals when he first heard the noise. What started as a rustling of footsteps outside grew larger and closer, transformed into something resembling voices. He’d become lost in his own thoughts, still seated among the flowers with his delivery ledger folded in his lap, when he heard the loudest of the footsteps clatter on the concrete stairs of the church. He closed the book slowly and rose to his feet, having stripped off his cloak and sleeve, and made for his nearest weapon.

People didn’t dare enter the church those days, at least since the roads connecting Sector Five had been deemed unsafe by the reconstruction council. Remodeling had been halted indefinitely until they could write up plans for a secure repair job, so Cloud had leapt at the opportunity for guaranteed isolation. In his mind, this justified his secrecy, and justified the way he gripped the hilt of his blade with two hands, prepared for whatever action may arrive.

He hoped it wasn’t Tifa. She hadn’t conveyed enough urgency in her text messages to launch a search party for him, though he hadn’t been home in a while, and wasn’t familiar with her current state of mind. But he still hoped. He wasn’t up to the task of returning home, wasn’t sure he could handle facing her worries and concerns and tears anymore. He wasn’t sure if he could stomach his embarrassment anymore, let alone any more in-person guilt-tripping, no matter how much he deserved it.

“Who’s there?” he croaked, throat still dry from the day’s voyage. It yielded no response.

“Tifa?”

Stupid. If someone had followed him, had his name marked in a little black book, now they’d know who to go for next. Cloud clenched his teeth and squeezed his hands tighter.

“Show yourself!”

Cloud had seen much in his life, such that surprising him those days had been deemed futile.

But the universe was different still than that which he’d grown up in. It, apparently, still had tricks up its sleeves.

Cloud’s sword clattered out of his hands.

From behind the collapsed woodwork emerged a head of bristly black hair and two hands pinned up in submission, pleading their innocence. The head shook back and forth rapidly, desperately, and tried to speak. Cloud couldn’t be sure if their voice ever emerged, not over the sharp ringing in his ears.

Muscles wrapped tight and swollen against bone, underneath warm skin. Large, billowing pants tucked messily into worn-in combat boots that buckled down the sides. A slice of a scar running across the right cheek. A smile that roared like thunder, silent from across the room. Eyes like stars and oceans and sunshine all at once.

Cloud wouldn’t let himself admit it. He wouldn’t think it. He couldn’t afford to.

“ _Cloud_?”

His skull instantly was in flames, his vision encased in rapid-fire memories trying frantically to piece themselves back together. He felt each synapse firing, felt each failed connection. The sword had drifted behind him and back into the flowers; he hadn’t the strength to turn back and retrieve it.

“It’s…it’s really you…”

Cloud dug his fingers into his hair, into his temples, searching for relief.

“Stand back,” he spat. “Don’t…don’t come any closer.”

“Hey. Hey, it’s alright. It’s me. It’s –”

“Shut up!”

Blood was pooling in Cloud’s hands and dripping from his forehead. There was a bleeding man on the ground in front of him. It was raining. The harder it rained the farther the man flew, higher than Cloud could see, higher than he could know.

He was going to leave Cloud behind.

“Cloud. I…I know this is crazy. Tifa. She told me what happened. About the crossroads, the timelines, Sephiroth. All of it. It’s okay –”

“You’re not real,” Cloud panted, clutching at his chest and the tufts of hair that dangled before his eyes, stained red with ichor. “You’re…it’s one of _his_ tricks. You’re not here. It’s not you…”

Before him, at his feet, lay a friend, a mentor, a companion, an angel, a shroud at which he’d prayed, to which he’d devoted love.

His chest was rippled and frayed. His ribs were broken. His arteries were chewed to shreds. His vocal cords were strained, pulled too tight until they’d snapped. His face still smiled.

“Let me prove it to you, okay?”

Cloud shook his head, but his protests died as they made their way through his esophagus. He heard the footsteps approach but couldn’t summon the force to flee.

“You and me. We met at SHINRA. We crashed, with Tseng, by Modeoheim. You told me you were from Nifelheim.”

The man at Cloud’s feet was laughing like he had in the snowy mountains, like summer had come early and was about to melt the ice about their feet.

“Y-your sword. It’s from me. You…you must’ve taken it when I…”

Cloud left his prized blade atop the sandy hill on which he’d watched the angel die. He hadn’t visited in a while. Suddenly, his back felt lighter without it.

“And you defeated Sephiroth. Then we were stuck with Hojo. And…and we got out. You were gone, out of it. I don’t know if you remember that part. But we got away for a while. I…I got you out of those old infantrymen clothes, too. It was alright. It was…it was gonna be alright.”

He was too close now; Cloud was frigid, like ice, stone with watering, trembling eyes.

Of _course_ Cloud remembered. He’d spent two years slotting things back in place and had walked into many a mental trap set by his past self. He remembered the specks of one-sided conversation, the comfort of resting next to someone underneath countryside stars, the rattle of truck beds as his head lay nestled against someone’s shoulder.

“That’s…that’s where I’m stuck. That’s where things get different.”

The boots stopped a foot or so away from Cloud, unsure and unsteady. Cloud didn’t look up.

“I don’t know what you remember, if anything. Tifa didn’t say much. But…but I remember how much I _talked_ to you, even if you couldn’t answer. I told you about Angeal, about how he used to tease me when _I_ was a rookie. I told you about Gongaga, how hot it was, and how slow farm work was, and how I was gonna take you there one day. It’s…it _was_ just like Nibelheim. I thought you’d like it.

“I told you about Aerith, too. I know she’s gone. I didn’t ask Tifa. I…I could just feel it. I told you the promise I’d made to her to finish all her wishes, and how awful I felt about not doing them yet. I told you about how much I missed her, and how pretty and kind and amazing she was. But I guess you knew that already…”

Cloud backed up, his heels now in the lilies now. He winced at how they crunched underneath his foot.

“I…I wanted to keep you safe. I think I told you _that_ , too. Or at least I hope I did. I wanted to get us both away from SHINRA so maybe we could be normal, have a normal life. I didn’t know if we’d ever make it back to Midgar. But I wanted to try. For us.”

A hand reached out to grasp at Cloud’s arm, which he quickly rejected. A pained murmur escaped his lips. He wouldn’t give in. He couldn’t go catatonic again. He couldn’t go back into that nothing, so he couldn’t accept that which was standing in front of him.

“And then you just had to go and _disappear_ on me like that… _not cool_.”

“You died,” Cloud corrected, before he could think better of it, before he could calculate the collateral damage it would cause.

“I mean… _I_ didn’t die. But I can see how alternate-universe Zack would’ve, considering how nasty these scars are…”

Foolishly, he watched as a hand pulled up the tee shirt and revealed the very same tattered, fleshy landscape Cloud had once seen oozing blood. The mounds of hardened skin rose like mountains atop scattered plains, the very countryside he’d traversed in a state of other worldliness a lifetime ago. They were fragmented and sharp, remnants of something so much darker than the rest of the surrounding environment exemplified. Cloud wanted to touch them, make sure they were real, make sure he still had sensation in his fingertips and a lucid head on his shoulders.

He stopped himself mid-reach, however, when they finally caught each others’ gazes. The mako sucked the breath right out of Cloud’s lungs.

“Remember?” Zack Fair asked, misty about the eyes.

_zack_

“It’s me. I swear.”

Cloud withdrew his hand. Zack couldn’t read his expression; for one thing, he was too lost in the fact that he was seeing Cloud’s face at all, let alone in full consciousness, and, secondly, Cloud seemed confused by his own countenance, anyways. It kept shifting. His eyes kept blinking and wandering and widening.

“I don’t…” he whispered.

“When you crossed over into the alternate timeline, with Aerith, I crossed over, too. Tifa says Aerith thought _my_ timeline was the intersection, whatever that means.”

“But how did you _get_ here?”

Zack’s mouth hung open, all awkward and unsightly, as he had no idea how to phrase what he didn’t understand.

“I don’t know. One minute I was walking with you toward Midgar, the next you were just gone. And Midgar had a meteor-sized hole in it.”

“You mean you weren’t –”  
Zack shook his head. “Wasn’t shot. Not _fatally_ , I mean.”  
Cloud’s hand hung in midair.

“Then where did you get…?”

“Dunno. They look familiar to you?”

Zack watched Cloud gulp, saw the lump move from his mouth, to the apple of his throat, and down into his stomach. Finally, he nodded, and stripped away his glove only to reveal a hand splotched with discolored flesh.

“What’s –”

Cloud cut his worried curiosity short, however, by committing and placing a ginger hand on Zack’s chest. Barely there, a ghost of a touch, Zack trembled underneath his palm. Cloud searched from something Zack would never quite understand, could never fully know, and seemed to find it.

He moved on to Zack’s scar, trailing his index finger down its length analytically, a doctor examining a mortally wounded patient to determine the best course of action. Zack didn’t dare move, lest he jeopardize the operation.

“I’ve dreamt about you,” Cloud decided upon, detracting his hand from Zack’s face, looking plain and unreadable still. “Ever since I pieced things back together. I remember how you died.”

“Tifa says it was bad.”

“You could say that.”

Zack wished he wouldn’t keep his sentenced so short. He’d longed for years now to hear Cloud’s voice, however timid or vivacious or benign it chose to be. But now Cloud was retreating again. He’d hung his head, taken another step back, was clutching at his temples again.

“I promise that I’m here, and I’m real. I…I don’t know how to convince you. And I get why you don’t believe me. I…I wouldn’t either. It’s crazy. I don’t even get it yet. Not sure I ever will…”

He knew he was rambling. Every word made his heart beat faster. But no matter the amount of words that made it into the fray, Zack kept dodging that which needed to be said the most: that he’d been waiting for this for years now, and that if this didn’t work, he may as well have been cut into by bullets and shrapnel in this universe and in the next.

“But…I just gotta tell you. I never stopped looking. I wanted to give us – _you –_ what you deserved. I wanted you to be happy. I’m being selfish now. I should’ve known that you’d made a life. I’m glad you have it. You deserve it. You’re happy now. That’s what I wanted…I mean, that’s what I _want_. It’s just…”

Zack had told Cloud much during their eight-month trek across Gaia. He told him stories about his childhood while they rode in truck beds underneath curtains of shooting stars and how lonesome he’d always felt, without a reliable friend nor a firm home to return to. He told him about the way Aerith could see straight through him, about how he’d always seen death in her eyes but never confided this much because it scared him to dwell on it. He told him about how there was a hole the size of a full-grown fist in his heart with Angeal’s name on it. He told him how, even though Cloud couldn’t talk, that, somehow, he was repairing it.

“I just wanted to see you. That’s all. Just to make sure you’re okay. I didn’t get that closure before. But. Now I’m good. And I promise to leave you alone. And Tifa. And Marlene.”

He used to pray to Cloud and to whomever was watching that they’d be okay in whatever form “okay” came. And, though this wasn’t what Zack was expecting, he knew the rules now. The universe demanded specificity.

“I’m happy for you, Cloud. And I’m sorry for abandoning you like that –”

Outside, a clap of thunder boomed across the roof of the church. Cloud and Zack jumped in unision, leaping back a few paces into the flowers, just underneath twin holes in the ceiling that Zack suddenly realized he’d never repaired, despite promising to. And as he stared up at their depths, where the sky was now black instead of an inky purple, his face was spattered with a slow, steady flow of rain.

It felt familiar. Cleansing. Like an ascension. The drops poured down his face and onto his shoulders, his chest, where the skin was torn by realities never realized.

It had been raining when he died.

“I’m sorry,” Cloud said, staring Zack dead in the face now. The mako swirled rapidly around his irises and was made only brighter by the rainfall. “I promised to carry on your legacy. And I failed.”

Zack gazed at the flowers as they swayed in the incoming breeze and smelled a scent he’d long since forgotten. Like the dream, she was speaking to him. Guiding him. Forgiving him.

“Doesn’t seem that way to me,” he answered, hoarse, touch trailing upwards to reach Cloud’s hands. This time, he didn’t protest.

“I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.”

Closer than when imbued with silence, Cloud pressed their foreheads together, skin dampened by rain, souls uplifted by their guardian angel and the funny favors the universe pulled at random, at will, for those who, apparently, deserved a second chance, after all.


End file.
